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Kraetos
Lovable Bastard
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Boston-ish
 
2012-05-16, 15:50

It has nothing to do with LTE. Verizon hypes LTE because the iPhone doesn't have it. When the iPhone does have it they'll find something else to hype.

Why is iPhone poison to carriers? There are three main reasons.

1) Carriers have zero control over iPhone. They can't recover the subsidy through crapware. They can't skin it to differentiate it over the iPhone you get from the competing carrier across the street. There is no good answer to "why should I buy iPhone on carrier X instead of carrier Y?"

2) iPhone's subsidy is huge. Carriers make a lot more off Android phones than iPhones. iPhone really is lose-lose for carriers: either you have it and make less money off it than your other phones, or you don't have it and get thwomped by carriers that do.

3) iPhones work better, longer. Very few Android phones ship with the current version of Android. Most are lucky to get one update, much less continual updates. Conversely, all iPhones to date have been supported for a minimum of three years. Want the newest version of Android? Buy a new phone.

Android is a carriers wet dream. A good enough OS being shipped by firms which are struggling to remain profitable. A big fat profit margin because the manufacturers compete on costs. They get outdated almost instantly which means more hardware sales. They are "open," which means more crapware, which means more profit.

Who cares if Android is downright hostile to users? It's really their only choice outside iPhone (you hear that? It's the synchronous blood boiling of all seven Windows Phone fans) and there's profit to be had!

The iPhone model pushes carriers closer to being dumb pipes that compete on network quality and price. It's expensive and time consuming to upgrade your network, and competing on price is the destroyer of profit margins everywhere. In a world where carriers are dumb pipes, the handset makers rule the roost, and that is Verizon's worst nightmare. iPhone represents everything the carriers don't want.

Logic, logic, logic. Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end.
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